Working hard on the movies to get them ready but i wanted to write down a small feedback.

Every year I leave for Berget with the idea that it could not be better then the year before. This was my 3rd Berget and oh boy I had fun! Our team was amazing, we worked together like we should we fought hard, walked a lot and most of all had fun!

I want to thank Berget Crew for the fast reaction when one of our teammembers collapsed due low something. I also want to thank every person that was in the area for the good care they gave and not want to get arround us just to see what was going on. This happened during the mission with the Car on friday night at CP03. I have footage of that and it show how good everything was. Berget crew brought us to the safezone for a checkup and everything was fine. So they brought us back to UPIR base. Got my gear and went back to the fight. Other teammembers had a small BBQ to close off the day.

The FPS test went smooth! Last year i was in line for 2 hours. This year i was there for 15min.

Berget Shop was good, prices were good but please organise the BAVS rental somewhere else.
I was waiting at the checkout for 30min, i was the first in line but there was something wrong with that players BAVS so the line was growing.

UPIR Base, it was awesome to see that people gave their best to fortify the base. Making trenches, strongholds, ...
We arrived on tuesday evening rather late and we got one tent for Shadows. So we dropped all our gear in that tent and set up our little tents just in case. That was a good plan because we were asked to leave the tent for Lima 02(?), they had no sleeping place. We had some tarps with us and made a shelter for the gear. Luckely there was no rain this year.
I don't understand why there is no map with who stays where in a tent. (or if there was one, i did not see it)

The red side is always like a big family, that was the same this year. If somebody had a question or needed something, people cared and searched for a solution. Thanks Lima01 for giving us a tarp to stay in the shade! We could not return it, you were allready gone.

The BAVS and AT4's should really better distributed. We did our best to fight vehicles without any bavs or AT4. Berget crew should just give all BAVS and AT4's to HQ so HQ can distribute it to the platoons that need it. Then they have first change to rent one. If they do not want it. The rest can be rented by who ever who wants one. Or at least reseve half for each force. I dont know how many BAVS or AT4s we had but i did not see many. Thanks to the HWD for being standby when needed!

"Anti-vehicle mines may also be found, they must be placed visibly on the road. They have an effect in terms of game mechanics only, and simply block a thoroughfare to vehicles. The mines must be cleared before any vehicle can pass. The engineer must wait 1 minute for each mine to be removed. Vehicles cannot pass until all mines are cleared. Mines are OD-green with a yellow marking in the center. Mines will be provided to engineers pre-game. "

Everybody had his own set of rules for the mines. We made boobietrapped mines but i did want to place them on the roads because nobody would have cared. And We got intel that when we lost the stronghold we were not allowed to place mines anymore. We lost the stronghold on Wednesday so we were not allowed to place mines anymore ( the only thing we had left to fight vehicles). On friday we heard that that was wrong and that Berget crew would not supply us with new ones, but we could still use the ones we had.

And mines need to be the right dimensions. There were mines that were just 10cm (or less) in dimension.
We carry 3 mines per engineer because they are so big. if you see those, that is just stupid.

Solleftea, i liked Harnosand more. The terrain is more different.
The ingame roads were great for vehicles, but we walked everything so i don't care really :p

I had so many good moments that i can't choose one. But waiting in an ambush, watching the enemy car closing on us and stopping 15m from my posistion right berfore the mines we placed, lights flashing in my eyes and i hear the driver yelling to the gunner and the gunner turns his turret to me. And suddenly on guys shoots his BAVS to that vehicle and it starts backing up. Adrenaline, Check! (Video footage will follow)

Engineers may defuse dynamic minefields at any time. This is done by engineers keeping one hand on the mine for 2 minutes. Only one mine per engineer can be cleared at one time ( Cannot have one hand each on two mines ), and only one engineer can work on one mine at a time. ( 2 engineers on one mine will still require 2 min

Engineers may defuse dynamic minefields at any time. This is done by engineers keeping one hand on the mine for 2 minutes. Only one mine per engineer can be cleared at one time ( Cannot have one hand each on two mines ), and only one engineer can work on one mine at a time. ( 2 engineers on one mine will still require 2 min

Right, in knew i read somewhere that it was 2 minutes to diffuse.
But no rules on placing the mines.

The mine policy was discussed before the game somewhere in this forum. Since if I remember right the rules state that placing only one mine in middle of the road is not considered as a "minefield" that you cannot cross with the vehicle, but also if you are the driver and you see mines (even one) on the road you are not able to drive over until all of them are removed. Which was a bit confusing.

Minefields may be created by either sides engineers at any time and any location without needing pre-approval. Placing mines is instant, but only engineers can place them by putting them open and visible on the ground. Mines may not be hidden, burried or covered in any way, and must be visible to drivers.
A road is considered Mined when it is covered by three (3) Mines covering the WIDTH of the road. There may be any number of mines placed to block one road , aslong as atleast 3 mines are placed to cover the width of the road .
Example: You may place mines 3 x 3 x 3 along the lenght of the road aslong as it maintain 3 in width to stretch across the entire road. A road that has less than 3 mines over the width of the road is not considered mined.

Clearing Dynamic Minefields
Engineers may defuse dynamic minefields at any time. This is done by engineers keeping one hand on the mine for 2 minutes. Only one mine per engineer can be cleared at one time ( Cannot have one hand each on two mines ), and only one engineer can work on one mine at a time. ( 2 engineers on one mine will still require 2 minutes ). A minefield is not cleared and cannot be crossed until ALL Mines have been cleared. A mined road ( 3 mines over the width ) is NOT considered cleared by only removing one mine.

So if one was to encounter 2 mines lying on the road, the road is not mined? Unless it originally had 3 mines?

So if someone were to place 3 mines (thus making a minefield) then remove 2 (for later use) that one mine would still be a minefield?

There need to be 3 mines over the width for the road to be mined.

Example: If we didnt Word it the way we did, some people would Think that they could just disarm one mine and then just claim its not mined anymore and kick away the other mines.

The reason its described as it is, is to prevent cheating on both sides. If we tell engineers that you cant just Place one mine , then we need to trust that. But if a driver sees 1-2 mines, you should still ASSUME that people play by the rules, and consider the road mined.

So to make it easy: for the PLACING ENGINEERS Point of view, a road is considered mined only when 3 has been placed.
From Drivers Point of view, if you see mines you should ASSUME that the road is fully mined.

From my GM Point of view, the mine rules , with a few identified exceptions, Went extremely well and most ENGINEERS followed the rules both when it came to placing and disarming. Any identified issues involved drivers.

The info Went out to all players well Before the game, and was also given to all HQs.
it SHOULD have been updated on the official Rule page, which sadly didnt happen, but that was a mistake.

But there are no difference in the rules from the rules page, with the exception of 1 minute to 2 minues disarm time. The rest is just clarification on how the mine rules are supposed to work. It will be re-evaluated and updated for next year.

This years Berget was a nice experience! But this year, the only reason it was a good experience was, because we made the best about our Situation.

Pro:

Chroning Station, really fast this year and a special one for HPA. And everything with the zip-ties worked (at least for me )

Game Area: I really liked it! If used right, it would be a perfect area

Weather: nothing to say

Team balance: I think, it worked quite good.

Time-table: early opening of the team-forums and (at least sometimes) taking up players suggestions from the forum.

Check-in at the Camp: Good idea from the HQ!

Campfire-handling: You found the perfect way to handle campfires. let the player build a firepit and then a BE-GM has to approve it! Thank you for this way!

CP-Map on the Internet! Really good thing, and it got better, wenn you used it, to bring some Informations to the players! Perhaps for the next year, make two options, one, where we can see the map, one, where we can see the latest informations, spread out.

Con:

I am sorry, this year were many cons, which could be avoided

- Pregame: Dont be rude, if some people arrive in the middle of the Night. Some have up to 20 hours driving and its very difficult to tell, when we arrive exactly. And if we arrive at the Offgame-zone and politely ask to sleep in our Car on the parking space, i think its just rude to say "no you cant, get off", especially if there are at least 4 groups of people, doing exactly this.

- Organisation: Berget is a really big event and I think it should be avoidable, that simple things are not ready. For example: Patches at the check-in. We were told to come back later at the Shop. We came back later, and they had nothing. We came back the next day and had some problems getting the patches, because they wanted a prove, that we had paid them. Its your fault, so you should inform your staff. Or building the Berget tents. At UPIR Base, several tents were not built up (besides the fact, that we did not have enough tents)

- HQ: Not everything was bad, but the UPIR HQ seemed to be very unorganisec. At first, it was very different, we had an officers briefing (quite late, but ok) and got some good planned missions. I thought, cool they really have plans to kick asses. But our mission got changed multiple times within 2 hours to gamestart and finally we endet up, wasting a whole squad of Heavy Demolition Unit for an ambush, which could easy be done by inf. For the Rest of the Game, we did not get that many missions. We had to blow up 2 Roads, repair 1 Guardhouse and the rest was just "go to CP X and defend it". We were HWD! and we were used as infantry (nothing wrong with some good old inf work, but dont just throw away your special forces!).
Sometimes, Swiss-Ops was sent out to hold a CP against FinBat. Sounds fair, SwissOps were 14 Players... and when we asked for reinforcement, because we were the only ones holding FinBat 500m above our base, we got told, that it wasnt possible... are you F****** kidding me? We had no Base-Defense, no Defense of the CP, the F&A-Depot or the Guardhouse... I dont know if our HQ didnt wanted that or of it was planed like that from BE...

- Camp situation UPIR.. We were just fucked up. Our mechs, 2 km away, so we had no chance to react in a quick way to something. Almost never seen a red vehicle in our Base.

- UPIR-Shuttle... Dear BE-Crew. If you tell us, you provide a shuttle, please make sure you really do. Otherwise, inform, that its not possible... But you pissed lots of players off, by this whole situation. There was a sign with "UPIR Shuttle" written on it. and during the first days, lots of players were waiting there... mostly after a long time, a BE-member went by and told (mostly laughing) thet there is no shuttle...

- Story: According to the Story, we were holding the whole Map and had isolated a part of the NAF (found out after Game, that this was FinBat)... Why did we have NO Information about this at Gamestart? And why were all CPs neutral? According to the Story, UPIR was holding the whole map!

- Cheating on both side.. especially at the last day... we were angry, because the NAF at the Stronghold cheated really obviously (car repairing within 15 Minutes, 3 times without returning to base, getting shot full-auto at the chest and not taking a hit) and then we had to see, that a lot of our red friends also cheatet (a blue sneaked up behind our line and placed one BB on each back... they thought it was friendly fire and continued... thats were I stepped up and told them to go offgame (i was hit and have seen how they just ignored their hits))... That was the moment when we decided not to spawn again and head back to base.

- People actually starting fights with each others... come on, really? If something botheres you that much, go offgame, go back to camp and eat a snickers or something but dont bitch around or even start a fist-fight.

-Same thing as every year: Keep the players updated (i heard, NAF HQ made something like an information wall). Please BE or future HQs, provide something, where players can follow the situations during the Game. Perhaps a journal, which is printed out and placed infront of the HQ every Morning and every evening, where we can see, what happened. Which missions failed, which one we completed, special things we found and the impact etc.

Most of the other things were said. We are looking forward to next year and hope it will be better.

Thanks to Gunnar and the whole HWD, we made the best out of this game and it was a honour, playing at your side!

Helvetica wrote:car repairing within 15 Minutes, 3 times without returning to base

Car repair takes only 15 minutes with two or more engineers (30 if there's only one engineer), and there is no limit to how many times a car can be repaired before it has to return to base.

You are right with the repairing time, totally forgot that. The other thing was told us by our mechs, that vehicles had to go back to base if got hit a second time (just checked the rules, nothing to find there) but also, the vehicles were moved during these 15 minutes repairtime, which should not be, i think. And i found smth about 10 minutes burn-out time...

I only have one suggestion that no one has said yet. Make TOW hit points only 1,5 stong. Now it was 2 or more and that made TOW vehicle vs TOW vehicle fighting pretty boring as it was just matter of second and luck if the other vehicle was destroyed. That was kinda boring, were you the shooter or the one who was shot. Longer fighting is always more enjoyable for both as TOW reload time is so long.

Jöntti wrote:I only have one suggestion that no one has said yet. Make TOW hit points only 1,5 stong. Now it was 2 or more and that made TOW vehicle vs TOW vehicle fighting pretty boring as it was just matter of second and luck if the other vehicle was destroyed. That was kinda boring, were you the shooter or the one who was shot. Longer fighting is always more enjoyable for both as TOW reload time is so long.

I think TOWs should have high damage points, but maybe they could add electronically the main problem they have; you have to keep the "ball" on the target until it hits. So maybe, having TOW hit a delay of 3-4 seconds, and the need to keep the beam on the target the whole time, might work?

I am not an electronics engineer so I don't know how to do that in practical terms, but that would be awesome.

We Decided to take command of Blue team this year. Our thinking was that we wanted to try something different, get to know the blue players and to balance the game better. Sadly BE didnt think this was a good idea. So we opted to go back to our roots playing as a lightly mechanized merc unit. Surprisingly we didnt get command of mercs either. After some debate we opted to volunteer as 2iC for Igoris, whom we played with previously and respected highly. Why BE chose this way we can only speculate on, i am sure they had their reasons.

Pre-game preperations

Having done this quite a few times and having at least the core team together playing as Mercs made this an easy breeze. Especially as there was a mere 100 players instead of the usual 800. With bout a month to go, there seemed to come new orders and information on a weekly basis, wich forced us to re-plan several times. We tackled it, but a new commandteam might have a fit over it. I had believed that BE had set their plan back at new year, so this was surprising to me.

Pre-game on site

The "village" turned out to be 5 simple shacks in the middle of a field that was un-defendable! Our bar with a "hidden room" for HQ was a joke. The room was roughly 2 by 2 meters, a single doorframe impossible to hide, no escape routes etc. So we ditched the idea of having a HQ altogether. This was a major let-down. The second let-down was the size of the civilian population: 4! At least riot control would be easy with 100 shooters...

Matters got worse as our GM, Arradin, also made it very clear that instead of the neutral part with lots of LARP opportunities, was a no go. We were at no point allowed to close any deal at all with Blue, and we werent allowed to close deals with Red rapidly either. So a lot of our planning went out the non-existent window.

Wednesday G+1

The "varied, interesting and plentiful" BE-provided missions turned out to be a single daily one. A drug run across the map. This of course was easiest to perform with a small team sneaking thru the bush. The other 100 players made some patrols (but not too far due to balance issues).

Thursday G+2

Lets say things didnt exactly improve. No matter how we tried to explain to Arradin that this sucked. He even opted to simply turn and walk away while we were shouting his name after him.
Drug run of course accomplished again even tough morale plunged. We opted to cap a few CPs as Red, and began negotiating with Red. Thinking that Red would load a huge amount of contract upon us we met with them in their base. Turned out they had hardly any money to pay for the contracts! After a few hours we basicly broke the bank.
We began to mount ambushes on Blue just to have something to do. No reaction came from them tough.

Friday G+3

Finally Blue attacked the village. Since BLue had a mission to capture one of the 3 commanders of Mercs, we of course had doubles and tripples even, while at the same time keeping the real commanders outside the village most of the times. Things didnt improve significantly until we convinced Red commander that giving us shares in UPIR corporation was a good solution to his money problem. We ended up owning a huge stake of UPIR, especially since Igoris had bought 25% of the shares last game already. Sadly Arradin refused to accept us as majority owner so we couldnt play out the idea of walking into red HQ and firing the staff. Would have been great to do tough

Making things worse, he didnt accept our third drug run because the ATV-team hadnt brought back the drugs! Didnt matter how much we pointed out the logic of it being a DELIVERY!!!

The Big mission came on with the truck, wich we had eyes on early due to excellent recon teams. Most have been said bout that op so i will not go into details. Just point out the wording of the order was that the truck will be considered successfull if it "drives along the western road" actually is english for "reaching western road".

Saturday G+4

Early on asked Arradin what todays mission for the big end-game fight was, getting a "Nothing. It was yesterday" was a huge let-down again
After a while he got back and mumbled something along the lines of Red being arses saying we were losers and that we should punish them. Basicly told him that it was end-game for us.

Summery

In total it was an absolute disaster. Feels like at no time BE or Arradin cared much about the 100 paying customers and saw us more of a balancing tool for red versus blue. Personally i am very, very disapointed. Maybe i was lucky having had Majk and Ford as GMs previously, for Arradin surely isnt fit to represent a company such as BE. Having heard about his actions at previous games as a sniper team leader i proberly shouldnt have been surprised tough. Things didnt improve either as back home we read about the gameplay happening on saturday. Total score...well count the amounts of

What i have learned from this

I will not attend B16, as the game description leads me to think it will basicly be the very same thing again. Especially as rumours tell me Arradin will be the GM again for Mercs.

What i find the most astonishing is that BE seem to fail to improve lately. This might have been the case a few years ago also, but at that time there was no competition if you wanted to play a good Big-game. Now there is. In the shape of other games in Finland, of wich i have heard very good things bout from people i trust, who played many bergets and say that this is what Berget should have evolved to. I think BE should let go of pride and get back on the program of improving the game, otherwise they seriously risk loosing hundreds of players to Finland.